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Ritza

“Marketing as Education”

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Core service

We produce long-form highly-technical articles as a service (for example, programming tutorials).

Readers love these because they can learn how to solve their problems, for free.

Businesses love these, because it exposes readers to their solutions, and wins their customers’ trust. We are a direct alternative to targeted digital advertising.

Instead of building an in-house publishing team, or contracting out to freelancers, businesses choose us for higher quality at a lower price.

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Digital marketing is not sustainable

Some people claim that we are in an “AdTech” bubble.

Even if not true, growing business through targeted digital advertising is not sustainable.

“Content marketing” is a response to this, but it is inadequate. Most content marketing is bad.

Imagine if we put 10% of marketing budgets towards something that actually makes the world a better place

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(real) content marketing

Companies like DigitalOcean, Transferwise have properly adopted content marketing

They have in house editorial teams (mini publishing houses) to push out really high quality education content, which is often highly technical in nature.

Everyone wants “in” on this, but few have the resources to make it work. Instead, we see many “fluff” articles - high frequency publishing, poor quality, listicles, etc produced by a single marketing person instead of a team.

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What is Ritza?

Ritza is not a freelancer marketplace. It’s something new. We produce content in a niche: highly technical articles that aim to educate the reader. We are similar in some ways to a content marketing agency, but with a client experience more like a SaaS product.

The client buys a monthly subscription ($5000/month).

In return, we give the client 5000 words (articles, blog posts, or technical tutorials) every month.

In the background, our technical experts have gained a deep understanding of the clients’ product or services. We have worked out who their potential customers are and what their potential customers want to learn. We produce content that will delight these potential customers.

We publish the content with our clients’ name on it (on their blog or on our publishing platform). Some percentage of readers will buy the clients’ product or service.

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Ritza: Technology

Client: wants to publish regular articles on company blog to attract customers

Ritza: “External platform”.

Website, checkout flow and content dashboard.

Ritza: “Internal platform”

Pipeline of articles being worked on, automatic text improvement

Full time writer

Full time editor

Full time quality assurance

Ritza is powered by two platforms: an external platform which makes getting technical content as easy as signing up and buying a content subscription by card and an internal platform which allows writers, editors, and QAs to easily collaborate on creating the world’s best technical content.

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Technology details

We can scale the production of high quality content thanks to innovative technology. From a client’s perspective, we are the “Stripe of Technical Content”. From our writers’ perspectives, we offer a unified writing and publishing platform

External platform

Website, online payments, and customer dashboard. Through the dashboard, the customer can request specific articles and download the completed articles

Internal platform

Writers can write, editors can edit, and designers can design. All are working on the same article, but each uses unique tools for the speciality. The internal platform includes a Grammarly-like checker

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What are the existing options for our clients

If you run a business and you want content for your blog to attract clients, you currently have the following options.

Build your own in house team

Hire your own writers, editors, and publishing experts

Expensive, not your area of expertise, can’t use all to capacity

Hire a freelancer or freelancers

Go to a platform like Fiverr and hire someone to write articles for you

Difficult to vet, need to be managed, quality not good, time consuming to find new people when needed

Hire an agency or outsource

Use a content agency like The Growth Machine

Expensive, usually no technical understanding of your product, will sell you “SEO Hacks”, long onboarding process,

Buy a subscription from Ritza

Use us.

Affordable, strong technical understanding of your product, spends 95% of effort writing and publishing high quality content,

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Business model

Ritza employs full time writers, editors, and designers in lower cost markets (mainly South Africa). English proficiency and expertise are abundant, but living costs remain low. All employees work 20h/week unlocking talent that does not want or cannot commit to a 40h work week.

Each employee earns a fixed salary of $1000-2000/month (above average in SA).

Each writer can support 3-4 clients. Each editor and designer can support 10+ clients.

After gaining just 4 clients, Ritza will be making $20000/month in revenue, able to support 2 writers, 1 designer, and 1 editor.

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The team

Answer the question, “Why are we the ones to solve the problem we identified?”

Gareth Dwyer

Technical Writer

Technical Expert

Account Manager

Founder

Ex AWS, Startup CTO, MSc, MA

Gareth in a experienced engineer and published author

Technical expert with some writing experience (formal or informal)

Quality assurance to check that the writer’s code is bug free and that tutorials can be followed from start to end without errors.

Keeps in contact with clients to ensure we understand their needs and goals.

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Milestones

Show where you are in the process and what’s left to tackle

2013

2014

2015

2016

2018

2019

Wrote first paid tutorial

Published video course with PacktPub

Published book with PacktPub.

Grew article collection, started receiving cold requests for articles.

Significantly increased writing rates

Wrote first articles in collaboration with others, making margin

2013

2014

2015

2016

2018

2019

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Competitors

  • Ritza has very few direct competitors. The closest I have found is
    • Iamondemand.com (who I also write for)

  • As alternatives, clients may get content from some of
    • Freelance sites such as UpWork, Fiver, etc
    • In house teams, such as those at Digital Ocean, Twilio, etc
    • Content marketing agencies such as ClearVoice, TheContentFactory
    • Google Ads, Facebook Ads, etc

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Financing and growth

  • I have personal savings to self-finance while bootstrapping for at least 12 months with zero income. However, I plan to be cash flow positive from day one, and to take on separate consulting contracts to self-fund if necessary.
  • I plan to never raise venture capital or any other kind of funding
  • I plan to grow initially to a team around 4-6 people, globally distributed, with expertise in writing, design, software engineering, editing, and publishing.
  • The maximum I plan to grow to (over several years) is 40 people.
  • I will run as an Open Startup, with a strong ethical standing and full transparency

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Appendix

  • You can find a portfolio of pre-existing work at https://clearvoice.com/cv/GarethDwyer

  • Or a larger collection at dwyer.co.za/writing.html